This is per new research by Lynne Vincent, an assistant professor of management at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and Maryam Kouchaki, an assistant professor of management and organisations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

With many organisations finding ways to encourage their employees to be creative, there can be a cost of creativity when it is seen as a rare and unique attribute, based on laboratory experiments, and a study of employee and supervisor pairs.

While creativity is generally valued, as much as other positive attributes like practicality and intelligence, the research found it may be over-valued compared to other positive attributes because creativity is seen as rare.

That sense of rarity leads people to see their creative efforts as special and valuable, making them feel they deserve extra rewards for their creative efforts.

That entitlement can cause them to steal in order to get the rewards that they think they deserve.

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